hi again! I have another question😭 do you have any tips on writing pre-existing characters? (while still adding more to the table of course.) How do you keep it in character? like how you write J or Uzi for example.
Unfortunately, this is an area where my expertise is more intuitive than theoretical.
Before I’d ever written a word of Hostile Takeover, I had watched murder drones a few times and read many fanfics (in addition to being moderately versed in character writing already), so I already had a decent knack for holding a character’s idea-shape in my head and rotating it into new configurations.
But let me try my best.
There are two different things you need to grapple with when writing an established character. It’s simple enough: you need to understand them both internally and externally. But I’ll explain.
External understanding is easiest to recognize and for me, easiest to pull off. It’s the character voice, style, and vibe. For J, it’s the buzzwords and condescension; for Uzi it’s the sardonic teenage lilt and the insecure grandiosity.
For this, I recommend getting the episode transcripts and reading them. Copy/paste all of the lines for the character you’re studying into a personal notes document, and pay attention to how their lines are constructed. What words do they use most often? how do they structure their sentences?
There are some broad spectra you can clock dialogue on right away. What sort of vocabulary do they use? Is it simple or complex, formal or slang, gamer or sailor? Do they speak concisely, or at rambling length? Confidently or insecurely, politely or rudely, passionately or callously, convincingly or deceptively, literally or flowerily?
These are generic buckets, but even if you treat them as dichotomies, ten yes/no binaries is already enough to write a thousand subtly different characters. And I already know you can think of specific vibes I didn’t list out here, because there’s so many to choose from.
Sometimes, when I’m writing J, I feel my command of her voice slipping, and I just write her as an archetypal Articulate Dominant Lady. But to a first approximation, that is J. She’s confident and she comports herself with sophistication. Not every panel of a comic will or can have a character fully rendered, and not every frame of animation has them completely on-model.
Another thing to note here is that just how a character sounds depends on who they’re talking to; J won’t address Tessa the same way she addresses N, nor V the same way she addresses Uzi. So The possibilities I listed off aren’t even true spectra, because a character falls differently on them in different scenes, in different moods.
It’s something you should consider practicing, the way musicians practice scales or artists do gesture drawing. Can you write someone who sounds angry? How do you write an expert versus someone ignorant? How do you write someone talking to someone they deeply respect?
If you can get a handle on the general principles of portraying characters, it’s a skill that’ll generalize pretty broadly.
But don’t just practice this. You’ll struggle with certain emotions, certain mindsets — everyone does. What you want to do is be on the look out when you’re reading and watching stuff — try to catch a writer pulling off what you struggle with, and think about how they did it
If there’s a fic that captures the characters about as well as canon, don’t be afraid to make a note of it, quote it somewhere where you can study it (but be sure to keep it labeled and sourced; don’t plagiarize. It’s for reference, not tracing). You have my permission to dissect my fics if you think it’ll help you.
But enough about general character writing advice. How do you practice writing specific characters? Here’s an exercise. Take some lines of dialogue from somewhere, the more the better, and think. How could you rewrite it so that it sounds as if the character you’re studying said it? What words would you have to swap around, what sounds all wrong and needs a rephrase — would they even say it all, and if not why?
All the better if you do this with multiple characters at once: then you can see side by side how their voices differ and how to distinguish them. (As well as what they have in common — sometimes it’s surprising.)
But speaking of distinguishing them, a great exercise is to try writing a scene that’s just dialogue. Not even with he said, she said tags, just the quotes. How can you make it clear who’s speaking from their cadence alone? (Hard mode: do this with more than two characters.)
I’ve been pretty laser focused on dialogue so far (i suppose it might be why my dialogue is what everyone compliments), but it’s far from the only thing that constitutes an external understanding of a character.
Body language and small scale action are key components of a character. J glares and puts her hands on her hips, Uzi balls her fists at her side, N salutes. In a sense, “body language” generalizes to the style of how they approach actions. V famously takes every excuse to crawl on the ceiling; is it really Uzi if she isn’t going for style points in combat?
This depends on the medium, somewhat; the techniques for portraying character in prose are different from those of a visual medium.
People (myself included) always say the mark of good dialogue is that you can tell who’s speaking without needed it attributed. Rarer, in my experience, for someone to assert that you should be able to tell who’s acting without a name or face. But shouldn’t you?
And more importantly, what does it take to make actions characteristic? Understand this, and you understand how to present characters.
Still, an external understanding of character is only enough to carry you through a scene or two at best. You can’t effectively tell a good story if this is all you have. What we’ve developed so far is less a character than an aesthetic tendency.
What an external understanding gets you is a way to ornament and present words and acts so that they evoke a certain character. What it doesn’t get you is the worldview and motivation that generates those words and acts.
To truly write a character, you need to know what they value — no, you need to know what they’re afraid of.
Every character is a story. Now, every story has a beginning, middle, and end. (Or as I spelled it out in my last answer to an ask of yours, presentation, transition, and conclusion). So, my assertion there is a little bit misframed, because characters aren’t really like this.
Rather, every character is an incomplete story. “Beginning”, “middle”, and “to be continued”. They have a backstory, their current entanglement in the plot, and the future directions they could go.
In my previous answer to you, I suggested stories should start in a state of falsehood. An example was that story of Uzi killing N, where she’s thrilled at first, only to later realize she’s feels kind of guilty. And I think this lens is the perfect one for understanding character arcs, and characters in general.
The inciting incident to a character’s life story is a problem that demands some resolution or cope to deal with, and a character is defined by how they deal with that problem. Even (especially) after they’re no longer dealing with the problem, those coping mechanisms remain.
Let me be more concrete. Take Uzi for example. Why is she Like That? Her mom was killed by murder drones, and her dad neglects her. So she acts out in class for attention, so she comes up with a brazen scheme to win her dad’s respect, so she’s brash and insecure. Because she’s isolated, she’ll never get anyone’s recognition unless she fights for it.
Or consider Khan. He watched everything his people built be torn down, and the only way for things he cares about to survive are if he builds something protects them. Why wouldn’t he be obsessed with doors?
Doll’s another clear case. She watched her parents be killed, so she must grasp for purpose and power by plotting revenge. But I think the important part of the trauma here isn’t the injustice of it, or even the loss, but specifically the loss of control. V violently reshaped her life, nearly had the cheerleader at her mercy — and thus, the revenge plot reasserts her control.
This distinction matters, because I think when she’s killing the prom court, she isn’t thinking it’s an unfortunate means to an end, she’s relishing that for that moment, she’s the one in control, and killing V represents finally returning to the way things were and are supposed to be. Not morally, but a order with Doll securely, comfortably, at the top.
You can trace an interesting throughline, and imagine that before V happened, Doll enjoyed a position at the top of the pecking order, unchallengeable with Uzi and the other losers beneath her.
The throughlines are why I find this reading so compelling: because how else do we explain what happens after prom, where Doll quietly ditches the priority of taking revenge on V in favor of the solver plotline?
One analysis is to parse it as, structurally, distinct. The story of Doll the Avenger has reached its conclusion; and since every character contains multitudes, you can tell a different story with the same body. Doll the Afflicted, thus, would be one with its own separate beginning, middle, and tragic end.
But isn’t it more compelling to notice that one concern echoes in both stories? They’re both about control. Before Doll fully understood her plight, she viewed V as the thing that had torn her life out of her own control — but after taking a bullet to head, after searching for a purpose in the wastes of Copper-9, after meeting “Tessa”, she comes to understand (almost) the truth: the Solver is what’s threatening to take total control, and thus is her true enemy and goal. Her demanding a patch to exorcise the possession is then simply a maturation of the same thing she was attempting when she subjected V to rebar-cruxifiction.
The key to this model of understanding characters is knowing that every character has a theory, a logic that defines how they view the world.
A character believes. I have a problem, that problem is this, and I have to do something, if I do that, then everything will be fine.
Remember what I said about falsehoods? You can tell a lot of great stories by having the character be wrong somewhere in that core logic. Maybe they’re wrong about what their problem really is, wrong that their approach to solving it is the best or only solution, wrong that their approach would even work.
There’s more to be said about how this theory of character informs how you should write character arcs, but I realize this is getting a bit abstract and removed from the problem of how to characterize them.
But take that model of Doll, for instance. If we’re right that her overriding theory of life is that being in control is the most important thing, how does that inform how she talks to other characters? One obvious consequence is she probably wouldn’t care about them except insofar as she could use them.
No matter how good your formulation of a character in these terms is, you can’t reduce everything to it. Doll is a cheerleader, she likes fighting with kitchen knives, she’s russian. You can tie a lot of character details back to their fundamental traumas and beliefs, but there’s a line to walk between insightful and boiling everything down to low effort archetype-matching.
Still, knowing what logic a character believes in deepest of all is huge. Another way to put this is — you know how they say every character thinks they’re the protagonist of their own story? A corollary of that is believing you have a life story means believing you’re in a certain kind of story. It’s driving a certain conclusion by certain tropes.
If you want to know what a character would do in a certain situation, look at it through their story-lens, and ask what the obvious next chapter would be. If Doll thinks she’s in a story of regaining control, she tried to do whatever would give her a sense of security and superiority.
This, I think, finally brings us to the real thing I want to offer. studying a character’s speech tics and mannerism can help you on the line by line level, and figuring out a character’s inner philosophy can illuminate their arc and core motivation. But despite being important, I don’t think either is the most important thing, structurally.
What lies between the two extremes? What marries the gap of abstraction? How do you decide the broad strokes of what a character does in a scene, in a chapter, in an arc?
The best way to think about characters, I think, is in terms of verbs.
You can’t understand uzi purely through the lens of seeking recognition, but you can broadly group the things she does and the ways she acts into behavior patterns.
Uzi rebels against authority. Uzi hacks together and into technology. Uzi blushes and stammers when boys are nice to her. She broods angstily and quips sarcastically and she theorizes conspiratorially. She gets scared and needs someone on her side. She gets manic and ready to kick everyone’s ass.
That’s not everything, but that’s a pretty expansive palette to work with, isn’t it?
Every one of these tendencies is contextual. To rebel, Uzi needs to be confronted with authority. She can’t be scared if there’s nothing to be scared of. Key to writing a character, then, is to look at what’s going through their mind, and figure out which of their preset scripts they’ll try to fall back on.
This is a place where limitations breed creativity — so it can be better if your list of verbs isn’t all-encompassing, at least if you know how to get creative in how you interpret them. For instance, imagine if Uzi encountered a person that she thinks is best talked to like a hacker trying to crack a system (imagine her talking to J like this :3)
But I’ve been yapping for a while, and if I don’t wrap this up soon my evening walk is about to become a night walk.
In summary, to understand a character:
- Study their dialogue and actions and try to imitate it. Practice different moods, different scenarios, and keep an eye out when you’re enjoying other stories for stuff you can mine and repurpose for portraying characters.
- Once you’ve taken a good look at their external components, try to group them into a broad but specific verbs. Think about what situations prompt what behaviors, and see if you can’t collapse different behaviors into expressions of the same impulse.
- Once you have a effective summary of a character, think deeply about what trauma or dramatic incident prompted this behavior. What must they believe about the world for their behavior to not only make sense, but seem like the only sensible way forward?
If you manage to pull all that off… Well, I can’t tell you if you really understand how to write that character — but you’ll be doing as well as I am, at any rate.
P.S.: you’ll note I didn’t really talk about J in this essay. Consider it an exercise for the reader. If what I said made sense, if the concepts are understood, you should be able to break her down, too.
In a way, doing this for her is both easier and harder than all the others. Be careful out there — my friend tried to understand J and wound up with over twenty thousand words of character study. This J shit is serious. But it was also some of the best fiction I’ve read, so maybe it’s worth it :3